alisha

https://instagram.com/yearnball?utm_medium=copy_link

[yearnball]

it’s new year’s eve

and fireworks paint the sky

i paint myself into a blank canvas

but the undercoats & messy strokes remain.

maybe i shouldn’t start over,

maybe i should finish the masterpiece, i think.

new year’s eve and my friends are laughing in a distance

“i’m loved, i’m loved”

i say to myself.

if i start the year being so loved,

what is there to be afraid of?

isn’t love the resolution of it all?

what do we want in our years?

to be loved,

and everything else that concerns love -

our finances, that allow for love to be secure

our friendships, that allow for love to be around in the laughter,

our relationships, that allow for love to be lived like a story,

our families, that allow for love to be a precondition - that allow love to be despite, and not because.

isn’t everything we do just an attempt of feeling loved?

in the new year,

i will be loved,

but i promise not to beg for it,

i promise to give it out, all that i have of it

and if it finds its way back, i’d welcome it with open arms.

in the new year,

i want to be loved, but most importantly,

i want to love loving.

i want to be loved for being.

i want love to feel easy when it occurs,

but i’m okay knowing it won’t come easy,

because love is a practice, and you must in the work.

so in the new year i will love working towards love,

and if i mess a few brush strokes in the painting,

it will still look whole,

shaded with the people that i have loved.

in the new year i will create a masterpiece of love,

and they will frame it in the museums,

they will say -

the love was here.

the love will always be there,

in the new years to come.

[yearnball]

They say all we really want as humans is a witness to our life.

So don’t you leave the crime scene.

I know you saw the blood on my hands, you saw me kill a different version of me over and over. You sit there quietly, not a sound. You tip toe and allow me to tear the skin.

You come and sit next to me as I slit my life open in front of you. “This is my heart” I say, and you recognise it by its beating.

Listen, it feels like a crime - tearing my life open in front of the world.

Like a cadaver.

They keep picking the organs out of me, asking me of its functions.

There’s caution tape everywhere

torches blaring into my eyes,

sirens tell me they’re near,

and the world is out to get me.

How do I do it? Hide all this evidence?

Of what I once was?

You zip lock it with my heart.

And when the cops come to frisk you,

Tell them how you witnessed me,

How I wake in the morning, how I mumble in my sleep.

Tell them words I don’t remember slurring in alcohol breath. String them poems I don’t remember writing, but reciting to you in broken fragments of nothings.

Tell them you see me, you see me whole and in parts.

You see my wounds, my bare flesh & bones. Dirt and dust. Till it decays.

Tell them you love me still.

Tell them you saw it all, and you could trace each scar - tell them how it bled.

Tell them you remember the melody that makes me cry, because you witnessed me remembering being a witness once - to someone else.

Tell them you saw me.

But not where I fled.

[julia-not-roberts]

i miss being 15.

this dream isn’t feeling sweet.

[megthemariner]

@ryebreadgf / The Truth About Grief, Fortesa Latifi / bone deep, m.v.e / Sidewalk, Richard Silken / unknown / 60 hours, m.v.e / @itsblackleader / Salt, Nayyirah Waheed / @heavensghost

[yearnball]

on routes & seats. (a letter to my future self)

there’s something so serene about a train to work

once in a while, you convince yourself of this

amidst the chaos & all the noise

but in a way, it really does feel calming to take the same route everyday

something so stable & easy about your legs taking you somewhere

without you having to think a thing

like a muscle memory of sorts.

and then one day you stop taking that route,

you start a different route & now you’re taking car rides with people you love

it’s calmer, but slower, takes stops at signal lights

but their laughter fills up the car,

and suddenly - all the red lights start to look like there is love in the car.

but slowly, their stops arrive.

and now - your routes feel emptier and shorter.

every morning is a rushed morning alone,

no one sitting by your side,

not a colleague, nor a stranger on the train

being in a crowd full of strangers felt familiar,

at least we were all going towards the same destination right?

lately life feels as if you’ve been laying down your own tracks -

rail by rail

paving a way for a route

without knowing the end destination.

but somewhere in the small walks and drives you take alone,

for a moment,

you forget you’re alone,

and remember to hold yourself

buckle up, put your seatbelt on and drive endlessly.

and you realise -

maybe love is stored in the seats you share with somebody in a vehicle.

(sometimes it’s shared with the music in your empty car too.)

but i hope you don’t drive so fast,

that you leave it all behind,

and forget your routes.

and i hope once you reach your destination

after you keep driving and driving,

till your tires flatten & you’re out of fuel -

i hope all routes you take,

find their way back to this route

with all seats filled and heading to nowhere new.

i hope all your seats are filled with people you love

and then every route will feel familiar to you.

[yearnball]

i sometimes wonder

what life would be like if we all saw green differently

not as the green in the notes of money,

or green as a colour of jealousy,

but green, rather as a beautiful green field to run into,

and not a care of the world,

or what it thinks of us.

a green plant growing out of a crack of the concrete on the road,

resembling growth in the toughest times?

i sometimes wonder if green looks different to us all, in different shades perhaps,

but we all believe it to be the same colour.

i sometimes wonder what the world would look like

if we could do the sole thing we were meant to do on it -

to live;

to exist.

and not spend a lifetime

figuring how to do the very thing that should come instinctively to us -

to live,

to exist.

i sometimes wonder.

but wondering costs money too.

so maybe i should go buy myself a plant,

and a really big house with a green field to run into,

and i can only hope,

when my feet touch the green grass,

i have lived, i have existed.

[yearnball]

growing up is a freaky feeling—

an eerie film reel unreeling.

we keep running out of film,

how will i frame it all in my memory?

what if my frail little mind flushes these frames in a hurry?

oh, growing up is a sickly feeling.

where are the glowing stars on my ceiling?

my room has no traces of me—

what a lovely crime scene unveiling.

growing up is a prickly feeling.

i ache in places i can’t reach with my bare two hands—

the wounds ache but the bruises are healing.

oh, growing up is a foggy feeling.

i read the forecast day after day,

and forget my umbrella anyway.

there’s a cloud of uncertainty—

i can’t tell what it’s concealing.

growing up is a tricky believing.

how come the moon doesn’t follow my car anymore?

how come i know that its moving means the time is passing?

that the friends are always leaving?

growing up is believing and unbelieving

on some days i don’t believe in religion,

on others i’m in front of god kneeling.

growing up is a freaky feeling.

[stargirldotcom]

- actually life is beautiful

@adarkerbeamoflight / ada limón / life is beautiful / @birthdaylobotomy / @tallahasseemp3 / rhian ellis / @death-born-aphrodite

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

[brenna]

[teaboot]

[wheresmyphonemp3]

[inthefallofasparrow]

[vellichnora]

On windows and sonder

@persimmon444/ soir de mai, henri le sidaner/ the great gatsby, f.scott fitzgerald/ @marsupialpudding / @godspeedmp3/ sonder, the dictionary of obscure sorrows

[reemillustrated]

all of us snoopy, all of us

[kurja-tales]

Kafka wrote "it would be better if you didn't come, since you have to leave again" but Faraz sahab wrote " Ranjish hi sahi dil hi dukhane ke liye aa, aa phir se mujhe chor jaane ke liye aa"

[nokhushionlygam-deactivated2023]

i want to wake up early but dawn ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi namumkin hai

[ijaazat]

in a train right now, i can see the city lights and i feel so so overwhelmed

[prettyboykatsuki-moved]

i have been crying for like 20 minutes about the sincerity of art and the act of creation like ohhh my god

[prettyboykatsuki-moved]

you are six years old learning about poems and you think about the first time you saw your father cry so you write about the rain. you are eleven facing the trauma of adolescence so you draw mermaids. you are fifteen and you fall in love for the first time and make a clay sculpture in art class for them even though you're unsure they’ll ever receive it. you are twenty and thirty and fourty and you are learning a different type of grief every year so you pick a pen or a brush or a flute and you make something because it's all you can do. my grandmother makes quilts out of my old baby clothes despite not knowing her own birthday. art and love and creation exist on the same line.

[lucidloving]

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy // Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women // Robin Roe, A List of Cages // Hayao Miyazaki, Kiki's Delivery Service // Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 // D. H. Lawrence, The Plumbed Serpent // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart // Alice Oseman, Radio Silence // Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

[sailermoon]

sometimes u listen to some pop song from 2010 and realize oh my younger self is still in here